Leader quits Texas cancer initiative over grant-review concerns

Updated 11:36 am, Friday, May 11, 2012

The top scientific officer of Texas' $3 billion cancer-fighting initiative is resigning, citing concerns about the review process that allocated $20 million of taxpayer money to two Houston institutions.

"I will stay until (the Oct. 5th Scientific Review Committee meeting) to be certain that those who are preparing applications to be submitted by May 31 will still encounter a functional peer review system," Gilman, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, wrote Tuesday in his letter to William Gimson, the organization's executive director. "Negative action (in a July meeting) would in addition be extremely harmful to the research community's view of science in Texas, and thus on the ability to recruit scientists to the state."

He wrote that Gimson's most critical concern will be to keep the external peer review systems intact and says Gimson's ability to do that is "dependent on the attitude of CPRIT leadership, particularly the oversight committee." The tone suggested anxiety that the grant-judging system he set up - composed of "some of the best cancer researchers and physicians in the country, free of conflicts of interest and all coming from outside of Texas" - is threatened.

The oversight committee, the institute's governing board, is appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House.

Gimson called the matter a difference of opinion over which committee should have reviewed the joint M.D. Anderson-Rice proposal, a kind of business plan to accelerate the availability of life-saving treatment now in development. Gimson said the proposal was evaluated by the CPRIT committee that reviews commercialization grants; Gilman, he said, wanted it evaluated by the committee that reviews scientific grants.

Says advice not sought

In an email Thursday night to the Chronicle, Gilman called Gimson "polite in saying we had a 'difference of opinion' " and added that he is "entitled to put whatever interpretation on the situation he desires."

But Gilman asked why CPRIT's biggest grant ever was given to M.D. Anderson for a proposal that was submitted very late in the process and included only 6.5 pages of "non-scientific description of a plan to conduct early-stage, preclinical drug discovery?"

"Drug discovery is research," Gilman wrote in the email. "The advice of CPRIT's excellent, out-of-state research reviewers was not sought."

The provosts at M.D. Anderson and Rice said they submitted their application in response to a CPRIT request for proposals in the commercialization category and that the funding decision was then up to CPRIT judges. Rice Provost George McLendon said the review of commercialization proposals by business experts is just as rigorous as the review of research proposals by science experts.

Search for successor

In the email, Gilman also asked why "seven very highly regarded and highly scored multi-investigator collaborative research applications (selected by competitive peer review from a group of 40) were not even brought to the oversight committee for consideration?"

Gimson said he has "no concern whatsoever" about the oversight committee's commitment to the integrity of peer-review committees. He said the committees' attrition rates, 20 percent, are in keeping with most peer-review committees and assured that future members would continue to come from outside Texas.